The
stylish Western “Da Uomo a Uomo” (“Man to Man”), written by Luciano Vincenzoni
and directed by Giulio Petroni, opened in Italy in 1967. Two years later, it reached American theaters
as “Death Rides a Horse.” In the film,
bandits attack a relay station at the Mesita Ranch where an express wagon carrying
$200,000 has stopped for the night to wait out a pounding rainstorm. After killing the guards, the four leaders of
the gang glimpse two women -- the ranch owner’s wife and daughter -- inside the
house. They invade the home, gun down
the rancher, rape and shoot the two women, and set fire to the place before
riding off with their loot. The only
survivor of the massacre is the family’s eight-year-old son, pulled from the
burning wreckage of the house by an unknown benefactor.

Fifteen
years later, now grown, the orphaned Bill (John Philip Law) lives alone at the
rebuilt cabin and practices obsessively with six-guns and rifles, hoping for a
chance to find the murderers and settle the score. Meanwhile, released from prison after
completing a fifteen-year sentence, an ex-convict named Ryan (Lee Van Cleef) rides into the
territory. He encounters Bill, briefly, when he stops by
the ranch to pause over the graves of the three people buried there. “I heard about it some time ago -- I’m
sorry,” he tells the young man mysteriously. Afterward, in town, two gunmen try to ambush Ryan in his hotel room, but
the ex-convict outwits and outshoots them. The sheriff, investigating, recognizes the spurs worn by one of the dead
men: they match one that hangs in Bill’s cabin, lost by one of the outlaws
outside the burning ranch years before. “Fifteen years, there’s been no new track, only a spur,” Bill tells
Ryan. “Then you come along, and there’s
three spurs.” It transpires that Ryan is
chasing his former partners in crime, who double-crossed him and left him to
serve time at hard labor. When he leaves
town, Bill follows, suspecting that his prey and Ryan’s are the same.

“Death
Rides a Horse” follows the template of Sergio Leone’s “For a Few Dollars More”
or “Per Qualche Dollaro in Più” (1965), which was also written by Luciano
Vincenzoni, in its structure of an older gunman and a younger one who form a
mutually respectful but shaky partnership to chase a common quarry. The teamwork has its advantages, but each
character has his own motivation for the chase, and ultimately each one strives
to reach his objective first, before the other. Vincenzoni’s script even recycles several other characters and
situations from his earlier storyline for the Leone movie, including Bill’s
fragmented, red-tinged flashbacks to the massacre. But the key differences between the two
pictures are as striking as the similarities, and “Death Rides a Horse” stands
nicely on its own merits. Like Clint
Eastwood’s bounty hunter Manco in the Leone film, John Philip Law’s Bill is
blond-haired and fast on the draw, but he’s also younger and less experienced
-- an amateur at manhunting, not a professional. This places him in stronger contrast to Van
Cleef’s steely and vaguely tragic rival and mentor, underscored by Ennio
Morricone’s signature themes for the characters: a mournful dirge that
represents the lingering trauma of the Mesita murders, a measured guitar and
drum tune symbolizing Ryan’s determination to find his former partners, and a
dissonant “vengeance” theme with a tortured flute solo. Where the enemy in Leone’s film was an
outsider on the American frontier, a depraved, dark-skinned bandit of mixed
Mexican and Indian parentage, the masterminds sought by Ryan and Bill have
burrowed into polite society and have become outwardly respectable business and
political leaders. Cavanaugh (the
wonderfully sleazy Anthony Dawson) runs a popular saloon and gambling
house. Walcott (Luigi Pistilli) is a
trusted town father. Ryan’s reappearance
inspires Walcott to use this advantage to pull off an even bigger score than
the Mesita Ranch heist. The conceit of
criminals masquerading as civic leaders would reappear in many later Italian
Westerns. In real life, as we all know,
crooks and opportunists rarely wind up as figures of power in commerce or
government.

The
Kino Lorber Blu-ray edition of “Death Rides a Horse” presents Petroni’s film in
a sharp 1.85:1, 1920x1080p edition. The
image isn’t perfect (some graininess is apparent, especially in the dark
nighttime scenes); nevertheless, it relegates decades of substandard TV and
budget-video prints to the trash heap. The bonus features include English and Italian language options,
subtitles, perceptive running commentary by filmmaker and critic Alex Cox, and
trailers for other Italian Westerns from Kino Lorber, including a forthcoming,
remastered BRD of “For a Few Dollars More.” While we’re on the subject, here’s hoping that someone will produce
comparably good widescreen, hi-def U.S. editions of Petroni’s somber Zapata
Western “Tepepa” (1969) and Vincenzoni’s playful gangster film “Mean Frank and
Crazy Tony” (1973), with Lee Van Cleef as a seasoned mafioso and Tony LoBianco
as his admiring, younger disciple.